this could be the end of us
by twistedservice
Summary: The universes in which all of them can win and one where they don't. Or, everyone gets their not so happy ending. Fields of Battle and Mayday companion.
1. i

Read this first, please!

First off: This is a companion to Fields of Battle. It's designed to go along with the story so if you haven't read that, almost none of this will make sense. You're still welcome to read it, if you want, but this was designed as both a thank you and also a sorry to the creators of the babies below.

Second: This is a (mildly) confusing piece. There are twenty-four blurbs, one for each tribute, about if they won, their victory, what they did, their homecoming, whatever I spit out of my brain at the time I wrote it. Yes, Kiero's in here, but you'll see what I did with his when you get there. You also may notice that even though I numbered each one according to their placement in FoB; I didn't use that specific tribute's name, mostly because I am an aesthetically-annoying asshole. For reference, Gera's 24th (the first one), Eitta's 23rd (the second one) and so on. It's all on the blog if that's too confusing for you.

TW: Brief mentions of alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, general bad stuff, and me being an ass.

* * *

 **24th. The Crazy.**

Somewhere along the way she stops blaming herself.

Her siblings died. That's a fact. But she didn't kill them. She got a voice in her head that blamed her more than she blamed herself.

If she steps off her plate she's another casualty for District Twelve. They don't need any more of those, but she doesn't know how to be something other than that. Herself and the voice in her head is all she has to cling to.

She wins the Games as the first victor in over a hundred and twenty five years to not kill anyone. Not that it makes her feel any better, really, when they make her watch the recap, but she knows that victory comes in a lot of forms. Hers is when the voice doesn't come back.

She thinks it got chased out when they announced she won.

 **23rd. The Mouse.**

He's got some of the lowest odds in Games history.

He knew his chances. Obviously, everyone did. By some form of a miracle he escapes the bloodbath with nothing but the clothes on his back - his tiny frame hunched over in the rain, shivering and shaking. He finds refuge in a bunker, forcing himself down to the tunnels.

He's still down there when Terron Calvert blows up half the arena with sponsor-gifted dynamite. He doesn't move. Not once.

His eyes, sunken and shallow in his face, only open when he hears the voice floating dimly through the tunnels, announcing that he's won.

 **22nd. The Pacifist.**

She wishes Lumin had never said District Five wouldn't lose anything this year. That means that she's whole, that she really won.

And she don't think she did.

Winning implies that she came out alright, that the blood that's on her hands is a figment of her imagination, that Abbie dying for her and Falco choking on his own blood was a terrible dream she had one night. She doesn't want to look her parents in the eye, doesn't think she deserves all the friends that still want to be there, by her side. She doesn't deserve it. There's no way she can.

She's not alright. She couldn't be farther than that.

 **21st. The Cheerful.**

He doesn't want to win, so of course he does. It's funny, the way the world works, that it doesn't care what people want or what they fight for (or not). He fights for someone else's survival, because he knows Elora and Quill have things to back to, so why shouldn't everyone else?

Maybe he does deserve victory, just like everyone else does, but he doesn't want to fight for it. Not when he's got no life to go back to.

It's ironic, he guesses, but he stopped believing in fate a long time ago.

If fate had favored him, he wouldn't be alive.

 **20th. The Manipulator.**

Her compassion is her downfall.

Theoretically, of course. Before the Games she shoved every ounce of emotion, every sliver of mercy so far inside of her that she shouldn't have been able to find it. She convinced herself of it, too, that she'd never be able to piece together her emotions if she won.

Two things: she finds it, finds it all, quicker than she ever imagined, and she still wins.

And it's only because Hariwin smiles, eyes closed, when they're the only two left. He shakes his head. And she takes the opportunity to step forward and stab him in the heart. He doesn't even look surprised.

She might as well have stabbed herself.

 **19th. The Overlooked.**

She's nothing but a number in a binary code, a faceless nothing in the wasteland. She's the only one that goes in for her District and the only one that comes out.

Ironic, she supposes. She's been alone, or at least felt like it, most of her life. A Mother that tries too much but doesn't get far and a dog that replaces her dead best friend isn't much to go back to, anyway. She's supposed to be a victor. She's supposed to have more than what she gets, more than what she can even imagine wanting.

Things were supposed to change, but maybe it took longer than she thought. She's a victor. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows what she's done, what she has the capacity to do. The things she _can_ do are endless. It's not something she's used to. Hiding behind a computer screen is what she's good at, not changing the world.

District Three is still the same, monotonous background that she left. Only now, the edges look the slightest bit more rebellious.

 **18th. The Light-Hearted.**

Being funny is hard when every ounce of fun gets sucked out of you in favor of murder.

It still makes Kellen laugh, when he gets back to Ten, but he has a hard time reciprocating.

The thing is, despite everything he feels - the sadness, the emptiness, the utter despair that feels something like claustrophobia, no one else feels the same. It's like they're trying to make up for what he can't do anymore. His sisters try to make jokes, Avis smiles at him in the sole hope of getting one back. It's becoming harder to fake it.

He thinks about killing himself, sometimes, and that's what scares him the most. No matter how bad things got before the games the thought would have never crossed his mind. Now that it's there it's like it tries to eat away at him until all that's left is the desire to be dead like everyone else is.

He can't do it. He can't do it to his family, or Kellen, or Avis.

But God, does he want to.

 **17th. The Defiant.**

Rage is a thing he's been feeling a lot of lately.

There's so much blood dried under his nails by the time he gets to his finale that it's practically a part of him. He stopped paying attention to it the day they made him kill Acacia, Finnea screaming in the background.

Somehow he ends up with other allies. The Nine guy and the Ten girl. The Nine girl joins them when both of her allies end up dead. He makes his first mistake when he kills the Four guy in front of them, in front of the screaming Ten girl. He's been hearing a lot of screaming lately, too. He ends up killing all of them, because apparently the Capitol isn't done with making his life as much of a ruin as possible.

He tries to imagine his little siblings, all four of them, clamoring around him and hanging off his back when he gets back.

When he finally does, they won't even come close.

 **16th. The Mold-Breaker.**

No one expected her to come back.

Ivory looks her over, after she wakes up, narrows her eyes. She's left alone soon after that. Not even her own mentor looks at her like a victor. She's nothing more than long tanned legs and a perfect manicure and hair that drapes over her shoulder like she never has to touch it. She's done with being their poster girl, with being the girl that accidentally came back, the Career that killed one person almost by accident and then won.

Her interview is filled with silence. Question after question. She blanks them all out. The audience grows tense.

They let her go when they realize she isn't going to talk.

Royal smirks at her, when she walks backstage, nothing short of proud. It's not until that moment that she feels like a victor.

 **15th. The Unstable.**

He leaves the arena laughing, dripping with blood. Nine kills. More than anyone in the last half a century.

The worst thing is, he's proud of it. When they tranquilize him, just after, he goes down smiling. He doesn't reconcile with his Father, gives his Mother a grin full of teeth and slams the door in her face when they try to make amends. So much for making things better.

Half of the District is terrified of him. The other half won't even look him in the eye in passing.

He doesn't mind, not really. He always knew what he was. It was the rest of the world that had to open their eyes.

 **14th. The Honorable.**

That's what they call her - a blessing of a Career, a warrior that refused to lay her swords down for anyone yet still showed compassion when it counted most. She's not like most Careers but she's not like most tributes, either.

It's what District Four used to be, before they shoved their children into a world of bloodshed and early deaths - before they started telling themselves the glory would be worth it no matter the outcome. She never believed it, not like most of them. She only wanted to do better for the world.

She's going to change it.

And she's going to make sure, no matter how many years it takes, that she never watches another person die like that again.

 **13th. The Unusual.**

She was always the weird one.

In this case, though, it wasn't bad to be one of the ones that stood out. Maybe being fascinated with death was what got her through it - she wasn't afraid to look at the bodies or of the blood that pressed into the cracks of her calloused hands like dried-up rivers.

Victors in Twelve are a rarity, so it's only fitting that they get the youngest victor of all time to go with the minuscule amount they already have. She's no rebel leader or star-crossed lover. She's barely a teenager.

She's too young for people to be scared of her, worried about her well-being, and yet they are. She should be having fun and playing with her friends and worried about her grades in school. Those types of things were trivial to her - always were, still are.

She found a body in an alleyway before she was of reaping age.

Why is anyone surprised?

 **12th. The Unwanted.**

To say the arena changes her is an understatement.

No one really wanted her to win. The anger at her being reaped was nothing but a facade - more of a shock than a true act of rebellion. But she comes back, anyway, to a train station full of people that are there only because they have to be, to two families who wonder why she's standing there instead of their daughters, and one family that starts looking at her differently.

Duke always loved her. So did her Father, and her Mother. It's a shame she took so long to realize it.

Queenie perches herself on her shoulders. She feels taller than she's ever felt.

It's a dangerously daring height, she knows, but there's no chance in hell she's going to fall.

 **11th. The Gentle.**

Her family is known for a lot of things - avoiding death when their last name screams it, producing a victor over 80 years ago that died not long after in a Game that shouldn't have happened, caring for everybody else above themselves, even when it doesn't make sense. She doesn't regret the way she was raised, quiet and unassuming, because it makes her who she is.

Somehow, Porter dies, and Acacia dies, and against all the world's odds, she's the one that's left. It doesn't make any feasible sense. They were the strong ones.

It takes her a while to realize that maybe she fits the last name better than anyone. So she vows not to change. To honor who she is by going home and living a life for the friends she lost, for everyone that's died, to prove that she's alright and one day, she'll be able to say it out-loud.

She's the second Mason to win the Games.

But she's the first of her kind.

 **10th. The Firecracker.**

When people expect things of you it's even harder to keep the mask on.

Maybe it's the hair, she thinks bitterly. Maybe it's such a contrast to everything around her that her emotions are supposed to follow. It's Finnea that dies first, and then Porter a few hours later, and she decides she wasn't wrong in telling herself that alone usually equals better. But it doesn't matter. Not after that. She _is_ alone. So what the hell if she blanks it all out for her own sake, everyone else would probably do the same.

She kills five people and convinces herself that she doesn't care. Theoretically, she probably should. They all had families and lives, just like she did. Like she does.

Porter's oldest sibling, tiny little Selby Crankshaw at only thirteen, looks up at her when she gets back. She should look sad, and she does. But it's the fire in Selby's eyes that makes her question everything she thought she knew. Ainsley Mason almost looks the same, tainted with a rage that no ten year old should be capable of possessing. That fire will be enough. They'll burn the Capitol to the ground.

Fuck the rest of the world.

 **9th. The Steadfast.**

She's so much stronger than everyone thought.

Normal, innocent girls from District Ten never make it far. They definitely don't win, either, but maybe she was never that girl.

Maybe she was always just waiting for a moment to arise. The Games definitely aren't the ideal place to do it, and not necessarily the one she ever imagined, but she'll be damned if she's going to change who she is to win. She doesn't, though. Because it was always in her.

Maybe she tells Ross everything, this time around. Maybe she never leaves Falco, doesn't run and leave Dess to die. Maybe she lets Quill stop _her_ from dying. Maybe it's entirely different, and she barely remembers any of their names when she gets out. She's strong, and she's going to survive, and maybe she cries more than she used to but so be it. If it happens, it happens.

She's a victor. And maybe she's not the one everyone expected, but she'll make sure they remember her and the names of everyone she loved in there.

 **8th. The World-Weary.**

Youngest victor ever wouldn't sound so bad if he wasn't so damn bitter about the whole situation.

He's twelve, why should he have had to kill people? He would have settled for the suffering Eleven brought, for a life dedicated to just barely scraping by. Sure, he complained about that too, but it's better than getting hunted down in the dark and chased and hurt ten times worse than he ever had been before. He wasn't afraid to kill, so he did. But it's still wrong in a way that he hoped he would never have to experience.

Putting on a show has never been his thing.

He knows damn well, though, that him stabbing Terron Calvert straight through the neck is going to be in highlights for the next hundred years.

Good, he thinks. Better him than that asshole.

 **7th. The Free-Spirit.**

What's the point of calling them her boys if all she does is watch them die around her?

It's probably supposed to be ironic. She was supposed to be the leader, yet she couldn't even hold herself together enough to do it. She's weaker than she thought. So of course, it's probably funny when she wins, because what else is she supposed to think?

Blaming herself isn't the right option, because it's the Capitol's fault, not hers. Or at least that's what she tells herself. But she can't be happy, either, because she failed everything she had hoped to save. Being alive doesn't feel right. Her being here instead of Spens, or Kiero, or Quill doesn't feel right. So she doesn't feel anything. She falls to everything that some of the victors warn about - to the liquor, to the drugs, to the numbness that makes her feel better than anything else. Being numb is better than hating yourself.

She's dead, a needle stuck in her veins, before she hits twenty.

 **6th. The Courageous.**

It's a girl.

At first, it's all that matters. She doesn't break, not once, survives the Games and come back more whole than most do. She has the knowledge that instead of just taking lives she saved one too. There are four kills to her name and two survivals - herself and her child. It doesn't seem like it's worth it, at first.

Perseus wraps his arms around her when she gets off the train and threatens to never let go, his voice thick. She decides then that maybe surviving was worth it.

Over half of the Careers make it to the Final 8. Terron tries to kill her in her sleep. Hariwin dies saving her, and she'll never know if he did it on purpose or not. Sheridan takes her hand on the second-to-last day and says that she doesn't regret it, just before she dies. There are too many things she doesn't want to forget, too many things that she credits to her survival.

Kaira Sheridan Harthgrove will know them all, one day.

 **5th. The Monster.**

He doesn't have to make the decision in this world: monster or not, compassion or killing.

Everyone makes it for him.

All his life he's been exploited, taught to be a killing machine until that's all he ever knew. For a while, there in the beginning, he's convinced that's all that makes him up - that the blood pumping through his veins and the air in his lungs is dedicated to one thing and one thing only, and that's victory.

So he spends the rest of his time proving differently. When he kills there's the slightest bit of mercy in his eyes, the swing of his weapon more careful than he'd been taught. He's been taught torture, and murder, and he's done all of those, he can't deny that.

But when he kills Terron in the Final Two, the predictions are all _wrong_.

 **4th. The Soldier.**

People sign up for war all the time. He's watched them do it, more often than he can count. Dedicated to fight for a rebellion that doesn't exist and a Capitol who doesn't care for the casualties it causes. There's so many of them. He hates war more than he can imagine hating anything, and he's still a part of it. Still volunteered for it. Killing is a necessary part of it. He knew that.

The guilt he feels has nothing on the blood on his hands.

It's not for the deaths. It's for Elora, because he's still not quick enough. It's for Kiero, who dies two inches from his outstretched hands because he can't do _anything_ , he's never been able to do anything. He's useless to stop everything but his own death and by then he doesn't care, not even about himself.

The war doesn't end, not even when he gets out.

 **3rd. The Understated.**

It's almost the same.

He does hate himself, when he comes out. Instead of it destroying him he realizes soon after that if consuming him whole is the next step, then he's probably already there. So he stops it, before it smashes him entirely, makes sure to kiss his Mother on the cheek every morning in their huge new house, watch the waves from the back porch.

Cas still falls over at inappropriate times. Genivieve still sighs and looks physically pained to put up with them.

He puts his life back together, piece by piece.

And no matter how long it takes, he finally decides it's worth it.

 **2nd. The Cynical.**

When he wakes up, there are no scars on his face.

It's not like he had a mirror in the arena, but he knew they were there. Could feel them any time he did anything other than sit there and stare at a wall. Suffice to say, it's weird not having them. Like they were the last step in erasing what he did in there and he didn't even get a choice in the matter.

He didn't get a choice in what he did, either, so it's probably fitting.

It changed him. Everything felt like it was for the worst. But Willow latches herself onto his back and doesn't let go, his parents are happier than he's ever seen them, his friends don't treat him any differently. They're all trying to tell him, in little words or less, that it doesn't matter. That it's okay, that he's home, that as long as he's here nothing else matters.

It does matter, though. But not in the way he expected.

He's a killer, maybe even a horrible person, and the world still looks off-sometimes, but he learns to hate it a little less.

It's not worth fighting. Life, that is. He might as well let it happen.

 **1st. The Victor.**

Except in this universe, he's not.

There are a million different ways he can die; blood spilling out of his mouth with a sword through his back, his skull split in half by an axe that he doesn't even see coming, throat ripped out by a mutt the leaps out of the shadows before anyone has the frame of mind to move. It really doesn't matter. Fact is, they're all not that great. Fact is, he can only win if everyone else doesn't.

What if everyone fought harder? Made a different move? Said one thing different, stepped one foot back instead of one foot forward? When you think about it, there's so many things to contemplate that it's a miracle he survived at all, in one universe or another.

He knows one thing: victory is something that comes at a cost.

In every other universe where he dies, he wasn't willing to pay it.

* * *

I know I haven't posted the epilogue yet. Eventually, though.


	2. ii

Everything in the AN for the first chapter of this still stands. If you didn't read that, for whatever reason, I'd recommend reading that first to have a better understanding of this. It will probably help a whole hell of a lot. Also, did it just take me a solid four months to get to this point after writing almost all of this in the past two days? Absolutely. Did this somehow get more dark-sided than the last one? Absolutely. Should probably change that summary.

TW: Suicide, self-harm, alcohol and drug abuse, mild homophobia.

* * *

 **24th. The Oddity.**

It's true – he always imagined what it would be like to be reaped.

He never imagined what winning would feel like.

It goes like this; when he watches Viscaria and Glenn die, four hours apart, he hides under a bed and cares, undeniably. Cares and mourns for two days, tops, before he wakes up the next morning and that feeling is gone entirely, like it was never there. There's a distant part of him that wishes he wasn't like this, because they were as close to friends as he could get in a place like this. If the situation had been reversed they would have cared. Of course they would have.

That's how he's always been, though. Maybe out of self-preservation, because ever since Mom died his father's been worse than usual and his brother's been a monster for years now, worse than even his own murderous hands.

He doesn't expect that to change when he gets back, and it doesn't.

Why should he change when nothing else will?

 **23rd. The Unseen.**

To this day he doesn't know how he made it off his plate.

Everything that happened was a blur. Every waking minute of every single day until the hovercraft plucked him out of the freezing water after half the ship exploded. He learns later on that it was the Six boy's doing, that even the Capitol hadn't anticipated how much damage gas could do to the entire ship. Half the Gamemakers end up dead for the mistake.

That kind of makes sense. He didn't kill anyone, after all, so it's only right that their deaths are mostly on his head now. They only saved him because he was mostly intact and close to the surface. They never wanted it to be him.

He didn't really want it to be him, either. But back home in the pastures, out with the cows, he doesn't tend to think about that.

 **22nd. The Competition.**

Victory _is e_ verything it's cracked up to be.

Not that she ever doubted that, of course. But it makes it all the more sweeter, watching all of her allies fall one by one, as if she cared a day in the world about them at all. Her and Alana make ruins of that entire ship, slaughter anyone in their path. She'll give the other girl credit – by the time they're finished fighting she's exhausted, hands slick with sweat against the end of the spear.

She still beats her, though. As if there was ever any doubt.

Duke's family looks hollow, unsurprised, and it takes all her self-control not to flip her hair over her shoulder and beam in their direction. The Capitol likes their victors at least a _tad_ sympathetic, so that she'll have to work on.

If only she had that sympathy in the Games. Maybe all of her allies wouldn't have ended up dead at her feet, if she had.

 **21st. The Underdog.**

She thought when she punched Leuth Saylor in the face she'd never be more terrified in her life.

How wrong she was.

They manage to kill Alana, her and Elias. Not quick enough, though, because not five minutes later he's on the floor dying, wheezing for every breath he has left and she can do nothing but sit there with a hand on his arm, like that makes it any better at all. She sits there for a long time, after, the realization that she's alone hitting her full force. Cerise and Larkin have been gone for two days and they hadn't seen them since. Maybe they killed each other. Maybe someone else got there first.

By the time she ends up finding anyone else there's only five of them left, and she's standing there looking Duke, Seren, Meritt and Kal in the face wondering how things could've been different, had she gone with them instead. She stands there and takes them all in because she's figures these are her last moments, that there's no chance of her beating any of them. That's when the real terror hits.

She's still thinking about how terrified she was in those moments, years later.

 **20th. The Childish.**

Her siblings have never looked at her like this before.

Acantha and Kylan, both of them never really cared. Walked away at the goodbyes the second she told them to because she's a spoiled brat and that's all they've ever known. She knows that better than anyone else. The difference now is that when they meet her eyes they don't know whether to hold her gaze or look away like she's capable of scorching them with just that.

Maybe it's because she left both of her allies to die, watched both of their faces appear in the sky that very night. Maybe it's because she decided that she didn't need anyone to help her, no matter how small she was. Maybe because she's only District Twelve's third victor in the past fifty years and people like her never, ever come back.

They can call her whatever they want, think traitorous things about their own sibling.

They cannot, however, take this victory away from her.

 **19th. The Obstinate.**

Riela leaves her house on the fourth day that she's gone and the next morning her mother is dead.

She learns this before she even gets back to Three. Aukai sits her down and tells her quietly, too quietly, too gently, that they found her dead in the living room. Don't know what she took, just yet, only that it was far too much. She can hear it already – Amias shrieking from the second Riela opened the door. She made her friend take care of her family because she wasn't sure they would survive without her and even then she was still _right._ Being right suddenly doesn't feel so good.

When she gets back it's too quiet, even though her mother never talked much, and she tries to hold her little brother from shaking apart at night when it feels like she should be the one falling apart. She has every right to be. Amias looks at her with a hint of fear in his eyes, because if anything six year olds are brutally honest and he saw what she did in those Games. Every second of it.

He's scared of her, she thinks. But she's all he has left.

 **18th. The Unorthodox.**

In the end he winds up moving to the Capitol.

Whether anyone believes him or not isn't the question. He did not kill two people and ruin himself doing it to not get his way once he got out. After a while they don't have a choice but to listen to him, if only to get him to shut up. He frames the certificate once again, crumpled as it was after all the time it spent in his frankly ratty pocket, and hangs it above the mantle for everyone to see. If anyone ever visited.

In three years' time _he'll_ be the stylist for Eleven. Right the wrongs of the past, and all that. He still remembers how awful he looked that day.

If no one really talks to him, he doesn't care. They were never worthy anyway.

 **17th. The Devoted.**

It turns out the goodbyes are the last time she ever sees her mother.

She gets back to Seven to Andie and Deviryn and her sister, all beaming and so much like home it makes her heart ache. Her mother is nowhere in sight. She's not dead - she'd refuse to die just to spite them all. To no one's surprise she's moved on with her life, cast them all out all because she had the audacity to fight for someone she loved. The audacity to love her at all, in the first place.

She marries Andie and moves into their new house and for some stupid, foolish reason she expects her mother to come knocking. Expects them to make up, to apologize to each other and embrace like mother and daughter should, because after everything that's happened this shouldn't be.

The knock never comes.

 **16th. The Assertive.**

He thought, when he finally won, that he would have free reign over his life.

He could do whatever he wanted without his parents' permission, could cast aside Alisha and be who he really was, instead of hiding it all the time. He trained for so long, perfected everything he could just so it could lead to this moment.

The six months between his victory and the tour are easily some of the worst of his life. If it was bad before it's worse now. He can never get away from his parents and Alisha refuses to let go of his arm, no matter what words spill out of his mouth. He can't get anywhere alone and his house isn't his, not really. Nothing is really his, not even his own life.

He sits in District One with a hand on top of Duke's grave and thinks, maybe, that Duke had the right idea dying while he had the chance.

 **15th. The Challenger.**

'Poster Girl' is not a title she minds very much. In fact, she's rather in love with it.

District Nine just doesn't _know_ victors like her. She's got all the confidence of a Career, striking in her own right and capturing the gaze of everyone in the room when she walks in. At the start of it all no one would say she had a chance at all. She'll forgive them for that. They're simpletons, after all, and she's leagues above them all, untouchable and as icy as a glacier. It's not their fault they didn't see her coming. Someone like her doesn't come around very often.

She killed Arella, and Sinora later on, and then allied with the Twelve Girl and the Seven boy, who had only made it that far by some unknowable grace, so it was easier to kill them in their sleep. There was no faltering there, not like so many of them.

It's not long until they're wondering if she was born in the wrong place.

Not that it matters now. Now she's right where she belongs: at the top.

 **14th. The Tortured.**

It seems like nothing's changed.

There were more shackles holding him down, now. On top of the loathing and spiteful glances the District is now wondering why they had to get him back instead of Kole. It makes sense – she was all light where he's obviously _not_. But not everyone thinks that.

His parents are still mostly indifferent to his sexuality and he has no friends, never did, but he goes back to school and a girl sits next to him and never leaves. Day after day she's still there, talking like they're childhood friends, and three days later it's a boy in the chair behind him. They don't say as much but he hears it in their voices. _We're not all bad. Forgive us for not trying to prove that sooner._

After a while the gazes fade. People forget how he lives his life and turn to focus on their own. Those two people who sat down next to him and now walk home with him, eat with him at the bakery after school, they're enough to make what he hates about himself fade to background noise.

It feels an awful lot like being set free.

 **13th. The Militant.**

Honestly, she wishes she felt bad.

There isn't a single remorseful bone in her body. Watching Rover fall, this time, doesn't mean anything at all. He takes a knife in the chest meant for her and she kills the Ten girl two seconds later, hardly glancing back at his body. All she ever wanted to do was go home, return to the life she had. It's an ugly life, sure, but it's something thrilling. The underground, the gang wars. Maybe that's why she was so suited to the Games.

One day she'll be on her own again. The charge will fall to her, and she'll take it gladly, just like she did every life she took in the Games.

She's going to run this District.

And no, Rover would not be proud.

 **12th. The Bloodthirsty.**

If people were terrified of her before, the looks on their faces now are positively _splendid._

She aimed for six, because that would have been poetic, but she had to save Kal for last and so she ended up with seven. She's always been a bit of an over-achiever in that regard, but she gave them quite a beautiful show so she better not here any complaints, at least not while she's still on this earth.

When she gets on the hovercraft she doesn't let them wash her hands, for a bit. She stares at the blood all over her palms and relishes it, watches it bloom and stain over the bed they make her sit on with something akin to marvel in her eyes.

She doesn't know what's more beautiful, the fact that she just finished it or the fact that so much is just _beginning._

 **11th. The Newcomer.**

She makes a different decision, this time.

The Careers will take her, but deep down the terror is enough to chase her away. She makes her own group instead - convinces the Four girl to go with her, the Seven girl not long after. The Threes are willing too, and all of a sudden they're bigger then the Careers themselves. They have a shot.

The five of them make it to the final eight. All hell breaks loose.

She kills Mireya and Lynn before they can manage to do much else, and when her back is turned Larz cracks his mace over Arella's skull, a noise that won't leave her for a long, long time. He's injured, though, bleeding from both legs and his side and it's too easy, to kill him too. She feels awful, cries over their bodies, but forces herself to her feet regardless. Kills the only other person left, by then.

She told herself the Careers weren't an option.

She became one anyway.

 **10th. The Melancholic.**

In comparison to the trials and tribulations of the other victors, most would say he had it pretty easy.

He, however, does not necessarily agree with that.

Whenever he goes to sleep it's Glenn's dark eyes he sees reflected back at him, and it takes two weeks before he's hardly sleeping at all, wandering the black hallways of his home in the victor's village, alone because he won't let his parents in and cold no matter what he does because it still feels like he's two seconds from drowning, the water ever-present in his lungs.

Gizelle tries, but even she's not bright enough to make the sun rise every day. It never gets any easier but that makes sense, because what about his life was easy before?

Tying the rope is the only easy thing he's ever done.

 **9th. The Watcher.**

He wonders a lot about what would've happened, had Iridium won.

He himself wouldn't have won, of course. He wouldn't have gone into the Games at all. He wouldn't have fought and bled and cared with his whole heart even when he tried his hardest not to.

When he steps off the train his parents embrace him like they never had before, warm and all-consuming and he wonders, quietly, if that's worth killing four people and watching Kole die. At the end of the day it was just the two of them and he couldn't bear to come back in a coffin like his sister did.

It's too late now. It happened and there's no going back to that moment where he decided to kill her. Where he decided his life was more valuable than anyone else's, despite the wrongness of it all.

God, does he wish that Iridium had won.

 **8th. The Heart.**

Things happen too quickly for him to process.

He shouldn't have been the one to win. It should've been wild Seren (her throat slit, blood spilling all over the carpeted hallway) or haunted, elegant Duke (one of his hands is gone, and then there's a sword in his abdomen and his own sword is lying useless at his feet, and he can't make himself pick the damn thing up). Hell, even Meritt, who for all intents and purposes has slid so far off the deep end he never knew him in the first place, should've gotten it over him.

(But Meritt's blood is all over his hands, pooling sticky between his fingers, and that's his knife in Meritt's throat and _God, when did this all go to such shit?)_

He asks himself the same question twelve hours later when he wakes up and watches his brother get shot in the head on live television.

 **7th. The Unknown.**

Eleven.

It's the number of people he kills. It's also the amount of hours he survives, after the Games end.

In hindsight, he shouldn't be surprised. They hardly kept him alive the first time, after he ripped his own arms open just to get away, away from their prying and their burning eyes and everything else in that awful room.

He does not go out with a bang. Not like he so expected to. Just something slipped into his drink and five minutes later he's dead and no one really even cares, because he's too dangerous alive. No one in the Capitol likes when their victor is just a tad _too_ unhinged.

The only mercy of the whole thing is that this event, of all things, is not something Kane has to watch.

 **6th. The Enduring.**

She's a first, that's for sure.

People have come out of the Games missing pieces but never really gone into them like that the first time around. Before people were disgusted by her, pitying, would cluck their tongues and frown in the direction of the empty air where her arm should be. Now they're in awe, cooing and fawning over her like she's a glass doll. If she was made of glass she wouldn't have survived that explosion in the first place.

She wishes she had two hands to hit them with.

They offer her a replacement arm. She declines. Marcel seems proud of her for it, and Atticus hugs her tight and says as much. The entire District is in awe of her too, but quietly and their eyes are shining with gratitude, and in their minds the empty air doesn't matter.

Finally, she thinks. All of this just to prove that it didn't.

 **5th. The Optimistic.**

He struggles with hating himself, a lot. Over time, he's surprised to find it getting easier.

He's so quiet at first that he worries the people around him. He knows his Dad stays up until he falls asleep most nights and Oliver and Ashton are always on the front step at the most unholy hour of the morning, tugging a bleary-eyed Juniper along behind them. Every time he smiles he falters in shock. Sometimes his friends do too. Sometimes he'll smile and then cry just after, like he has no right in the world to be happy. Sometimes someone will come in the house to him sitting on the stairs, lost in some darkened corner of his head, and they'll fail to pull him out almost every time, the first few months.

Those are the bad days.

But sometimes he'll open the front door and Juniper will have leaves in her hair from when she got shoved into the brush, or his Dad will accidentally set the spray of the kitchen tap on them all until they're wheezing, giggling, arms all wrapped around one another.

He just has to keep reminding himself that there are better ones.

 **4th. The Faded.**

Nothing is the same.

He expects to feel some sort of vindication, stepping off that train. All he does feel is hollow; the same way he's felt since he woke up. Something inside him is missing. Maybe it's always been missing, since Estelle died, and he just now noticed it. He didn't want to be a murderer, a monster. Everyone always said he was too soft for that kind of life, but look at where he is now.

Despite it all, he's too cowardly to off himself. He empties the liquor cabinet in his house and his parents turn a blind eye, and eventually all his friends trickle away except Jesper, but even he looks too tired to deal with it all, some days.

They'll lose the second Galore sibling, one day. They just don't know it yet.

 **3rd. The Puppet.**

He lets Magne kill Erna.

Accidentally, of course. That's what he tells himself repeatedly over the next three days while Magne strides around and complains and _he never shuts up, does he?_ Erna would ask and she'd grin wolfishly at him and why couldn't he have woken up sooner?

The next two days he spends telling himself that _he's okay, it was justified_ after he stabs Magne in the back, because that's what Erna would say and she'd tell him he did the right thing. In the final two the other person drowns before he even sets eyes on their face and he doesn't let himself find out who it ever was.

Back in District Eight, Kiero's always around. Marcos comes to stay with him, occasionally, and he always makes sure to cook him dinner and when he's done he hides the knives in some unseen place that he never ends up finding.

That doesn't matter, though. He spent over half his life living on the streets.

He's more creative than they think.

 **2nd. The Betrayer.**

People aren't as surprised as you think they'd be, when she gets out.

She always had it in her. That's more terrifying than her actually winning. Someone having that capability, especially in Eleven - it's nearly unheard of. This time, she kills not one but two Careers, both her allies, and someone else her District hardly remembers, after seeing the rest. When she comes back, it's _different_. People are wary, hesitant to catch her eye. Sabrine is the only one who will.

Well, and Phil. But that doesn't last long either. They're in the fields, the two of them, because of everything that's changed he hasn't. What has changed is her, and the sickle in her hand, and the tip gleaming in the afternoon sunlight as she buries it in his neck.

No one will ever know she went from five to six. They won't find his body until two days later. She won't look back.

After all, what's one more betrayal added to the rest?

 **1st. The Missing.**

It doesn't really matter what could've happened to her, does it?

She's already gone.

* * *

To everyone that's still here - thank you.


End file.
